Słowotwórcze zasoby nowych stylów funkcjonalnych w językach słowiańskich
Derivational resources of new functional styles in the Slavic Languages

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, the author focuses primarily on several new functional styles, and such productive word-formative processes as compounding and affixation in modern Slavic languages. Minor processes like blending, clipping, and back formation are left aside. Based on large corpora and smaller hand-collected samples of electronic texts, the data has been drawn from advertising, daily press and the communicational sphere of information technology. The author hopes to demonstrate that the functional side of word formation is significantly more complex than simple naming and/or syntactic recategorization, etc. This becomes particularly evident as one ventures beyond the rather stable area of the lexicon and its conventionalized word-stock, and begins to consider active coining of novel lexical items, something that depends heavily on contextual factors, including the semantic, stylistic, textual and social environments in which they occur. The very act of forming a complex word serves a specific purpose in the textual and/or situational context. It is often that particular and specialized functions can be discovered, many of a metacommunicative nature. The paper aims to examine the processes of productivity and to highlight creativity in word formation with respect to functional discourse roles. Lexical creativity in journalism, advertising and electronic communication is employed in order to achieve certain stylistic effects, such as humour or irony. It is also a device to convey to the reader a sense of the author’s learnedness, sophistication, distance, and so on. It manifests itself in puns and other kinds of word play, metaphorical extension, willful error and duplication of the role of an existing formation. The article also deals with the evolution of specialized word-formative types of complex words, ones that lack a connecting vowel as a mean of expression of complex concepts of attributive and contextual content. Composition of a new type of complex words corresponds to a historical drift in formation of analytic and agglutinative lines in Russian.

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